I say, Jeeves - this is a plum role! Robert Daws' charming tribute to comic genius PG Wodehouse will chase your cares away
Verdict: PG quips
Rating:
Wodehouse In Wonderland is actor Robert Daws' charmingly tweedy portrait of the comic literary genius (and cricket buff) PG Wodehouse — a man with a talent for clipping life's worries for four.
He chats us through Wodehouse's years in Guildford, where he was brought up by '20 aunts' after his parents went to work in Hong Kong.
He talks brightly of the author's breakfast regime (coffee cake, toast and tea), shares his views on alcohol ('a misunderstood vitamin'), recalls episodes of Jeeves and Wooster, and offers a dead bat to personal questions from an American biographer.
Wodehouse dreams of Shropshire, and that hour after lunch 'when nature seems to unbutton its waistcoat and put its feet up'.
The setting, though, is not England but Long Island, where PG or 'Plum' repaired after the War. Arrested and interned by the Nazis in 1940 while living in France, he blotted his copybook by recording innocuous radio broadcasts for them before his release the following year.
His American exile lasted until his death in 1975.
Unable to keep the dark side out entirely, PG crumples as he recalls the passing of his wife Ethel (aka Bunny).
But Daws, like Wodehouse, is never melancholy for long, in a show seasoned with songs from Cole Porter to Ivo Novello. Like strawberry jam on a cream scone.
Wodehouse In Wonderland runs until August 24
Wummy (Just The Tonic, Cowgate)
Verdict: Fleabag meets Motherland.
Rating:
Wummy is Charis King's one woman show about an exhausted London teacher from Dorset who's a 'wannabe yummy mummy'.
Pitched somewhere between Fleabag and Motherland, it finds 'Wummy' desperate to escape a grotty flat-share and have kids with 'a man in finance', who can provide her with her dream. A fancy kitchen island with a pull-out dustbin.
After a few crazy misfires, she lands on rugger bugger Charles. Game on.
King is a terrific performer. A good mimic who has a feel for her many and varied characters (including her posh bestie from Chelsea, and a Bulgarian flatmate who taught himself English by reading the complete works of Oscar Wilde).
She also has an alarming talent for going to extremes.
But if she really wants that pull-out dustbin to supplement the graveplot investment in Chelsea ('if you want to get on the property ladder, get under it') she'd do well to relax more with the audience, and get us more behind her.
Wummy runs until August 24
Motorhome Marilyn (Patter House, Gilded Balloon)
Verdict: Misery Marilyn
Rating:
Michelle Collins has had a good run on telly as Cindy Beale in EastEnders and discretion might have been the better part of valour in her Edinburgh Fringe debut.
Here she takes the form of a burnt-out Marilyn Monroe lookalike, working out of a motorhome in Los Angeles.
Sharing her life story with a python (who turns out to be her partner in crime), Marilyn delivers a monologue written by Ben Weatherill, who gave us the much sweeter late-life gay love story Frank And Percy, starring Roger Allam and Ian McKellen, first seen in Windsor in 2023.
This new show was Collins' idea, after she met a Marilyn impersonator in a motor home.
But it's hard to find anything inspiring in her troubled character, who runs away from Southend to follow a Texan sex predator, only for her life to dwindle (further) into tawdry jobs and abandonment.
Collins gives a decent rendition of a Marilyn number, No Return, and wears a series of moth-eaten Marilyn outfits.
But things get really nasty in a needlessly sweary yarn in which she tells how she butchered an Elvis impersonator. Literally.
Collins' loyal fans may want to come and catch her at close quarters anyway.
Everyone else should be warned that this is an extremely dispiriting experience.
Motorhome Marilyln runs until August 25
Hamlet by New York Circus Project (Assembly Roxy)
Verdict: High flying Hamlet
Rating:
New York Circus Project's Hamlet is a bold, 60-minute precis of Shakespeare's drama (which can run to four hours), that mixes snippets of dialogue with airborne technical feats.
The ghost of Hamlet's murdered father (Arthur Morel Van Hyfte) is a double-jointed trapeze artist.
Ophelia (Maleah Rendon) knots herself up inside a hoop, and Hamlet's friends Rosencrantz and Guildernstern (Caroline Bertorello and Kaisha Dessalines Wright) are tumbling clowns who perform a head stand — on top of each other.
Hamlet himself (Maddox Morfit-Tighe) somersaults impressively, and there is honesty in his no frills delivery.
Even so, Sam Landa's production could push the connection between movement and story further — more art, less natter — and the climactic sword fight should certainly focus on the Matrix-like kung-fu.
Nonetheless, there's an excellent soundtrack ranging from Nina Simone to Chopin, via techno, drum and bass...and the Benny Hill theme tune. The result is a daring, youthful, high-flying trip to Elsinore.
Hamlet by New York Circus Project runs until August 24
Consumed (Traverse Theatre)
Verdict: Undigested
Rating:
ONE of the characters in Karis Kelly's dismal black comedy set in Bangor, Northern Ireland, drinks two bottles of M&S Malbec in under 20 minutes. But Kelly's play does something similar by necking way too many ideas, way too fast, in just 75 minutes.
Covering four generations of women in Northern Ireland, the play takes place at the 90th birthday of raving unionist Granny Eileen (Julia Dearden).
The shindig is hosted by her hoarding, bipolar daughter, Gilly (Andrea Irvine), whose own daughter, Jenny (Caoimhe Farren), committed the cardinal sin (if I can put it that way as a Roman Catholic) of marrying a 'taig' (a Catholic) in London.
Jenny, in her turn, has a daughter, Muireann (Muireann Ni Fhaogain) with an eating disorder... which she blames on her genes.
And there's more, as the one-act play takes a horrifyingly bleak turn to touch on the grim subject of male suicide in Northern Ireland. And we've still got the 19th-century famine and the Troubles be squeezed in.
Never mind skeletons in the closet, there's even stuff buried under the kitchen floor.
There are some bitterly amusing proverbs dispensed by the cursing granny, but characters are advised that the only way to survive in Northern Ireland is to look away.
Theatregoers hoping to survive the festival would do well to follow suit.
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